As Cooper saved Forest, he had the class to embrace the club’s past
IT was not an offer that John McGovern, twice European Cupwinning captain of Nottingham Forest, had ever received from one of the club’s managers, so he asked Steve Cooper: ‘Are you really sure?’ when invited to call by whenever it suited him, to watch the players training.
Yes. Cooper was sure. ‘We’d like you to be involved,’ he told McGovern. And so it has come to pass that at 11am on many a weekday this season, one of the legends of Brian Clough’s great Forest side has been there on the touchline, watching Cooper run the training sessions which, against considerable odds, have now kept the club in the Premier League.
it’s a very different world now, of course, McGovern tells me. it looks to him a bit like a Star Wars set, with the drones buzzing overhead to film the players and a battery of machines to monitor them. Certainly a long way from the Nottingham Corporation asking Clough’s players to leave the public pitch on which they trained before the 1979 European Cup semi-final against FC Cologne.
But one football principle remains as fundamental now as it was when Clough put them through their paces.
‘Attitude,’ states McGovern. ‘That’s what i always look for first.’ he’s seen a lot of that in the past nine months. The intensity of the warm-ups, the tasty tackles flying in, in small-sided games.
he’s been struck by the way Cooper asks players for their opinions — not something Clough would have generally invited. he’s been struck by the importance Cooper ascribes to getting his messages across to the players, collectively and individually. And by his occasional intolerance when he senses he doesn’t have a group’s attention. ‘ Listen to what i’m saying,’ he’ll demand.
McGovern laughs when asked if he sees a little of Clough in all this, as if to say that man was simply incomparable, but he certainly sees a thread back to the past. ‘The way the crowd sang Steve’s name at the last match against Arsenal took me back,’ he says. ‘it was an echo of how they felt for Brian Clough.’
Many managers would not want a legend of their club’s glorious past observing their work from close quarters and McGovern is acutely conscious of not being one of those former players who ‘poke their noses in’, as he puts it. But Cooper will occasionally seek his thoughts, along with those of Garry Birtles, Paul hart and ian Storey- Moore, who have all watched training this season.
Managers with the class to embrace the past generally have the modesty to know that they are not bigger than it. That is certainly the case with Cooper — and it goes some way to explaining his cult status in Nottingham. Those who know nothing of Nottingham Forest were oblivious to this bond during some very dark days last autumn when the Sky Sports Fantasy Football show were mocking Cooper’s appearance and he seemed to be dust.
At the training ground, there was a constancy about him even during a run of five successive defeats early in the season, McGovern says. Cooper would head back out on to the training pitch and return to the coaching staple of making players better.
Many of the 22 players who arrived at Forest in the mayhem of last summer have improved — in particular the forward Taiwo Awoniyi, who was raw and needed coaching after arriving from Union Berlin.
There is a pattern here. Cooper made players better when he led the England Under 17s to the 2017 World Cup. And when he took over at Swansea, where the club’s American owners were reluctant to invest and it fell to him to find younger, cheaper talent. Many of his England winners joined him in south Wales, including Morgan Gibbs-White, who has been a revelation at Forest and arguably their player of the year.
GIBBS-WHITE has created 63 goalscoring chances this season, more than Jack Grealish, Mohamed Salah and Gabriel Martinelli. he is being closely observed by Gareth Southgate. And the FA are closely observing Cooper, who they view as one of their own. Do not be surprised if he ultimately succeeds Southgate.
There are no guarantees, of course. it is a measure of football’s brutal powers of destruction that Cooper’s prior achievements counted for nothing at his point of gravest jeopardy this season. Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis proved the exception to the rule by not sacking him — in part, because he could not find a better alternative; in part, because Cooper so obviously carried the supporters with him. They even sang his name after those five defeats.
The decision is one to celebrate, as we near the end of a season of crushing managerial insecurity, with those in the hot seat living in what one observer has described as ‘a permanent state of impermanence’.
if Cooper is not quite the Premier League’s manager of the year then he is certainly the most under-rated manager of the year: an individual who will have turned the light out most nights last winter, wondering if the following day would bring the roof down on his career. he did not complain about pressure, or that he was being asked to cohere a team from one of the most rapidly assembled squads the Premier League has ever known.
‘he kept the laughter going,’ McGovern says, relating what he saw from the touchline. ‘There’d be a nutmeg and the players would be in pieces, taking the mickey. That told me that things were all right.’ McGovern will be back at the training ground at 11am tomorrow.
Cooper is not one for extensive reflections on his body of work but in his office, next to a number of portraits of Clough, hangs an image of Denzel Washington appended with a quote. ‘Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship,’ it states.